TODD SEAVEY
author of Libertarianism for Beginners and writer of/speaker about many other things

Monday, March 23, 2009

"Indoctrinate U" and "Ghost Breakers"

Evan Coyne Maloney’s documentary Indoctrinate U is showing tomorrow (Tue. the 24th) at 6pm at Village East Cinema at 2nd Ave. and 12th St. It’s a rare case of media looking critically at left-wing political correctness on campus — including the double standards routinely used to silence right-wing groups while giving left-wing groups the keys to University Hall. A private institution can run itself in any idiotic way it wants short of treating its customers fraudulently, of course, but it’s pretty obvious these institutions also serve as training grounds — and even models for society — in the totalitarian minds of the political activists, student and professor alike, who populate them. So thank goodness someone’s looking at them skeptically.

One college professor sympathetic to this cause, a co-founder of FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights in Education), Prof. Alan Kors forwards (via Sarah Federman) a video clip from the old Bob Hope movie The Ghost Breakers that’s a thirty-second reminder media weren’t always as incapable of using humor and irony against the leftist powers that be as they generally are now. (Of course, these days we instead have Sacha Baron Cohen, seen in the photo above as Bruno, who it suddenly occurs to me looks a tiny bit like Sarah Federman and like the Fixx’s lead singer, Cy Curnin — not sure what to make of that, and I don’t mean to insult any of them.)

That Bob Hope clip is from 1940, the height of the New Deal, and a simple reminder (which should not be necessary) that comedy is obviously braver when directed at the powers that be (hint: Obama) than at the powers already ousted and defeated (e.g., Bush).

[...] Speaking of the federal government preparing their Marxist civilian army … Todd Seavey is looking forward to seeing the documentary Indocrinate U this evening. The film investigates the double-standards used to silence right-wing speech, while at the same time promoting left-wing totalitarian speech. Sounds like something all Americans must see! [...]